My musings, reflections on life here in Shiloh, Israel. Original, personal, spiritual and political. Peace, security and Israeli sovereignty. While not a "group blog," Shiloh Musings includes the voices of other Jews in The Land of Israel.
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Havel Havelim is the most veteran of the jblogger carnivals and probably one of the longest running blog carnivals there is. Blog carnivals are like "floating" internet magazines. They float from blog to blog, like "floating crap games," l'havdil.

Havel Havelim, the international jblog carnival, was established by Soccer Dad, and is now run by Jack. The term “Havel Havelim” is from Kohelet, Ecclesiastes, which was written by King Solomon, who built the Holy Temple in Jerusalem and later on got all bogged down in materialism and other “excesses” and finally realized that it was nothing but norishkeit, “havel” or in English “vanities.” I think that King Solomon and his father King David were the original "bloggers." The books they wrote, when you take them chapter by chapter, can easily be described as blog posts. The stones they used to write on made them last, so that we can read them now. I doubt if today's technology will preserve our words for so long.

Being that this edition of Havel Havelim follows the Second International Jewish Bloggers Convention, I like to give more of my opinion about it. Yes, I mentioned some points previously, but the more I think about it the more I think it missed what many of us needed. Many of the serious JBloggers are writers, journalists if you recognize blogging as news media. Twitter and Facebook are very different. I'm not alone in just wanting to use the social media to promote my blogs, not to "socialize" with "friends."

It was also pretty strange to have speakers telling us from the podium that they aren't quite sure what we do. Most of us jbloggers who showed up at the conference, even those who post infrequently, do more than rant about how the kids spilled juice or that the neighbor's dog barked the night before or that we are looking for a date. Ok, sometimes I do look for a date to reference a historical fact. Some of our blogs are very serious, dealing with politics, current events, health, parenting, cooking and Jewish Law.

Again, the blog carnivals were off the program. If you're reading this, that means that you're familiar with our Jewish blog carnivals. Or at least you will be by the time you finish reading.

I guess my neighbors and I are getting older. Not everyone dies of old age, but statistically there's more of a chance of fatal illness. We're mourning a neighbor who in our "olam hazeh" way of seeing things, seemed too young to die.

I heard that JPost's David Horovitz mentioned my blog in his keynote address at the Convention: does anyone have footage available (broken down by session)? I'd love to see it. (The 4 hrs of footage on the NBN site aren't buffering nicely...)